The Jobless Recovery

Posted Mar 7, 2013 by Martin Armstrong

I have received a lot of inquiries about the jobless recovery. Some questions ranging from what is going on to others asking advice to give children for a career. The economy is evolving like a child. People do not understand the evolutionary process nor does government. The economy is never stagnant albeit unions have tried to arrest its progress, but instead they have accelerated the migration of skilled manufacturing jobs. Illustrated here is a chart of the changes in the civil work force from 1900 to 1980. I have mentioned before that every event has a benefit no matter how bad it appears – the plus & minus. The Great Depression with the dust bowl killed agriculture and it forced people off the farm and to become skilled labor. The technology advance replaced the workers as farm equipment displaced workers. This completed the last phase of the industrial revolution that began during the previous century.

Today, we have rising productivity with the largest economy yet employing only about 5% of the world’s civil work force. We are in reality the most productive economy in the world per person. There are three major trends impacting simultaneously that are still changing the future employment world and formal education is falling behind failing utterly to prepare the youth for the real world that lies ahead.

FIRST: Government is way too costly and we will see a shrinking of government employment especially in state and local government.

SECONDLY: Unions are a dying breed and serve only to promote stagnation trying to force higher wages for the same job without increasing skills. They are ensuring their own demise since unions have priced themselves out of jobs only to be replaced by robots.

THIRDLY:Technology is now replacing the skilled worker with robots in the manufacturing world, but we have also displaced low end service jobs from answering phones to bank tellers, ticket agents, and attendants in parking garages. A typical robot can do the job of generally two people, never grow tired, and costs nothing in taxes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZzLAsHiGHU

On the one hand we have the increasing use of robots not merely in manufacture and industry, but also militarily with drones. The future of robot technology becomes mind-blowing. But it is far more than robots doing just human tasks. It is entirely possible to create thinking robots that will react to situations and can even be programmed to survive at all costs.

What we have been able to accomplish with programming is so far ahead of the curve it takes a real programmer to appreciate the advancement. Our model does what thousands of analysts would be able to accomplish in a single day. Monitoring so many variables is revealing the true hidden nature behind the global economy. We have been able to deconstruct the inherent nature that has revealed that Adam Smith was correct after all. What we have accomplished is awaiting every field. The future is always in engineering because unlike other areas of study, it teaches you to solve problems that are yet to be defined rather than memorize answers to satisfy a test.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0DIAXJrqjo

The future lies in engineering and learning programming. Forget MBAs and trying to get into the big banks. They are a dying breed and once government cuts the umbilical cord to debt and also makes that next step in evolution to a new form of government in a completely new world of monetary systems that will be inevitable, the banks will be dead and no longer will they be able to claim too big to fail to escape prosecution. Even within my lifetime they will be broken up, dissolved, and any hint of proprietary trading as a bank will go the way of the Dodo bird.

Learning programming will be like learning to read and write. This is the next generation. Free your mind to see the possibilities. Once you know HOW to write a program, then once you understand a subject matter, you can write a program to do anything. This will be the future. This is the field that the youth should move into – engineering. This above all else teaches you HOW to think globally and outside of the box. It is the way of the future that we must embrace in order to stay competitive. What our computer can do could not be matched in any short-term period using humans. And if you could, the cost would be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Maintaining that many people monitoring the entire world efficiently is really a human impossibility.

So yes, government is seeking to employ this technology to control us and even kill us if we get out of hand. Drones are here to stay and that provides way too much sophistication placing way too much control into the hands of too few, with everything we do being recorded for those watching from the skies. Scientists Warn of Killer Robots under development.

This is the way of the future. As Schumpeter saw the driving force behind the business cycle was INNOVATION, this is so true. You must always wake up each day to explore what can be learned today. Absorbing knowledge is the fountain of youth for it always keeps you exploring rather than becoming bored with life only to slowly die.